Cook, Melville & Gauguin – Three Voyages to Paradise *SALE*

Product Description

Summer/Fall 2011 Premier Exhibit issue of Mains’l Haul

Features the Museum’s extraordinary exhibit: Cook, Melville & Gauguin – Three Voyages to Paradise, currently onboard the Berkeley, with an introductory tour aboard the Surprise.

The 124-page, full-color issue blends the historical relevance of the complex yet stunning exhibits into four articles, with the final forty pages dedicated to the Exhibit catalog.

Museum President Dr. Ray Ashley and Exhibit Curator Marcus De Chevrieux place the exhibit theme within its historical context, beginning with the voyages of Captain James Cook. The reader travels back to the Age of Discovery, when the South Pacific was perceived as a vast, empty and foreboding place. Cook’s Three Voyages (spanning 1768-1779), with a complement of artists/scientists aboard, soon transformed the perception of vastness into an Eden. For the first time, Europeans could glimpse the exotic South Pacific portrayed in the works of skilled European artists such as: William Hodges (Cook’s Second Voyage, 1772-1775) and John Webber (Third Voyage, 1776-1779), as well as other artists/scientists.

Another voyager, author Herman Melville, famous for scribing Moby Dick, is called to mind through period paintings, illustrations, samples of his writings and, most beautiful of all, the Melville Scrimshaw, which hung in his home.

A large portion of the Journal is dedicated to the works of Paul Gauguin, as the exhibit showcases the largest collection of Gauguin sculptures on display anywhere in the world.

The Collections owner, Richard Kelton, President of The Kelton Foundation, introduces the reader to the artist/sculptor, Paul Gauguin. As many people are more familiar with Gauguin’s paintings, sketches and engravings of Tahiti; Mr. Kelton focuses on a single sculpture and takes the reader on a new Voyage of Discovery: to Gauguin’s island home, to the inspiration for his art, to his personal writings and, thus, into Gauguin’s thoughts. After years of research, Mr. Kelton has unveiled his most-prized Gauguin, the Nave Nave Faruru for the first time. In presenting the circumstantial evidence, from which he deduces that it is a sculpture by Paul Gauguin, the reader explores Gauguin’s life, with Mr. Kelton as the adept navigator through Gauguin’s Paradise Lost…. discovered by Kelton himself.

The Exhibit is only here at the Maritime Museum of San Diego til Jan. 1st, 2012